Queensland Polling Narrows Further In The Final Days

LAST-ELECTION PREFS AGGREGATE: 52.4-47.6 TO LNP 

SEAT PROJECTION OFF STATE POLLS IF THIS 2PP IS ACCURATE: LNP 48 ALP 37 GRN 4 KAP 3 IND 1

(AVERAGE OF FINAL POLLS BY RELEASED 2PP: 53.5-46.5 TO LNP, PROJECTION FOR THAT 2PP IS 51-34-4-3-1).  

As the final polls come out, we seem on for a closer Queensland election than earlier this year looked the case.  For much of the year the Miles Government has had classic hallmarks of a doomed state government - almost ten years in power, federally dragged, beset by crime complaints, and polling terribly.  Even four weeks ago there were signs of some recovery, but nothing that looked like life.  Now in the final week the LNP has recorded a couple of polls based off which it would be only slightly more likely than not to get a majority.  As the pendulum slightly favours Labor, it's even still plausible that if there is a modest polling error, Labor could scrape home.  Equally it's still plausible that the LNP could outdo the polls or get a good seat distribution and get a very solid majority.  But the very heavy drubbing that for so long looked so likely now seems a much more remote prospect.  If the late polls are spot on, Labor will almost certainly still lose, but they won't have trouble with saving the furniture.  Not that they needed the furniture the last time they were voted out.  

This has been accompanied by some remarkable changes in leadership ratings.  In the final Newspoll, Steven Miles has recorded a Better Premier lead, albeit of 3%, which is typically nowhere near enough because preferred leader polling skews to incumbents.  But such as it was, that was his first Better Premier lead ever, and the first for a Labor Premier since April 2023, snapping a run of 17 losses from various pollsters.  Crisafulli has gone from a personal rating of net +12 at the start of this campaign to net -3, his first negative rating of the term that I can find after at least 19 positives.  This sort of recovery by a state government that has started losing heavily in polling is very uncommon.

The Commonest Arguments For OPV Are Overrated

In the leadup to the Queensland election (which I'll have a roundup post on overnight) there's been some undignified arguing about whether Queensland should use optional or compulsory preferencing, with both major parties accusing each other of seeking to rig or corrupt the system.  Opposition Leader David Crisafulli has repeatedly used misleading language to attack compulsory preferencing, claiming that it forces voters to "vote for" candidates they don't want.  (It actually only forces them to rank them, which lacks the same level of obvious moral repugnance).   

In New South Wales, the debate about optional preferencing is typically a lot more sedate.  Optional preferencing has obvious formality benefits in NSW especially at state elections (though this can flow on to worse informal voting rates at federal).  Perhaps partly because OPV is in the NSW Constitution, and perhaps because any government wanting to do so would have a tough time getting its way in the upper house, there doesn't seem to be any serious push to get rid of it.  It also seems that for whatever reason, non-major-party candidates (who might be thought to be disadvantaged most by OPV since they most often rely on winning from behind) actually do well in NSW state elections, much better than in Victoria.  

However, in Queensland, where there's no upper house and the election winners can write the rules for the next election, the debate is an on and off culture war item between the major parties.   In Queensland, OPV first came in from the 1992 election after it was recommended by the post-Fitzgerald Electoral and Administrative Review Committee, although the arguments considered had very little to do with corruption.  It was repealed for the 2017 election in unusual circumstances.  Katter's Australian Party and the LNP had supported an electoral amendment bill to increase the number of seats from 89 to 93.  The minority Palaszczuk government moved an amendment to add the return of compulsory preferencing, which then passed and the whole package was then passed over the LNP's vehement objections.  

ACT 2024 Postcount

Numbers in the form Labor-Liberal-Greens-I4C-others.  

BRINDABELLA: Final result 2-2-1-0-0 (Greens defeated Liberals for final seat)

GINNINDERRA: 2-2-1-0-0 (no change)

KURRAJONG: 2-1-1-1-0 (Independents for Canberra gain from Greens)

MURRUMBIDGEE: 2-2-0-0-1 (Fiona Carrick gain from Greens)

YERRABI: 2-2-1-0-0 (no change)

Final total 10-9-4-1-1

WARNING: ACT election analysis is highly technical.  This page is rated Wonk Factor 5/5.

The letter Q, where used without explanation, means the number of quotas.

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Welcome to my page that will follow the ACT postcount until all seats are resolved.  This year each seat has its own section with updates scrolling to the top for each seat.   Updates will be added frequently for the close and complex races in Brindabella (three party fight for one seat) and Murrumbidgee (within-party contest between two Liberals).  The other seats will only be updated if anything I consider notable happens.  

Last night Elections ACT were extremely fast at getting two provisional distributions out with the second arriving at 8:21.  I believe this was all the electronic votes available to include on the day and the reason there were no more afterwards is all remaining votes were paper ballots that still need to be scanned over coming days.

ACT Election 2024: Counting Day Live

Startline from 2020 election: 10 Labor 9 Liberal 6 Greens 

Likely result 10 Labor 9 Liberal 3 Green 1 Ind for Canberra 1 Carrick 1 undecided

In doubt: Labor vs Liberal vs Greens (Brindabella) - Liberal appears likely 

(some others not fully confirmed)

Labor/Greens combined majority (as opposed to shared balance of power) looks extremely likely.

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Comments will appear here scrolling to the top from 6 pm

11:15 End of night wrap: What we have seen in the ACT election is no major change for the major parties, with Labor, Liberals and Greens all down a bit on vote share at the moment with the emergence of Independents for Canberra.  The Greens were extremely lucky to win six seats in 2020 and an unsurprising but small decline in their vote was always a risk of costing them three.  While 10-10-3-1-1 still looks like the most likely scenario there remain some different scenarios in Brindabella where the flow of preferences between the left parties could still see the Greens retain against the odds, or there is a very weird scenario in which Labor gets three, but more likely is that postals snuff all this out with the Liberals winning.  A further distribution is needed here.

The two most likely fourth-party chances, Thomas Emerson and Fiona Carrick, appear to have won convincingly, but there has not been a wave of "independents" as some expected. Still, these are good breakthroughs after decades of only three parties winning.

Not much really changes in the ACT in terms of the majors.  If the Liberals do manage to tie Labor's seat count that will be another tick in the box for federal drag, but nothing like the tick seen in the Northern Territory.  I am not sure the question "how can the Canberra Liberals win?" really has an answer yet, until Labor really screw things up the place is simply too left-wing,  

NSW By-Elections 2024 Live

Pittwater (Lib vs IND 0.7%), Epping (Lib 4.8%), Hornsby (Lib 8.0%) - ALP not contesting any seats

Pittwater expected IND gain, Epping and Hornsby LIB retain.  

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Updates will appear here from 6 pm, scrolling to the top.

8:08 Very distracted by ACT but a very large prepoll has come in and there is nothing dangerous there for Scruby.  Scruby's lead is too large.  

7:37 The pattern in the booth voting is quite set in Pittwater and something very radical has to happen in prepolls or it's all over and Scruby has won.  

7:11 Several more booths as well as postals in in Pittwater and things are not getting any better now for the Liberals after that aberrant third booth.  

6:57 Uneven swing between booths in Pittwater, the third one in actually swung to Ryburn on projected 2CP.   

6:51 Whopping swings to Scruby in Pittwater in the early booths, coming out at around 10% 2CP!  If this continues it will be over pretty fast.  Nothing scary for Liberals to see in the other seats, the Greens a distant second in both of them.  

6 pm: This thing is on, there's even a results page.  No action expected for at least half an hour.  

Queensland 2024: The Polls Aren't Getting Much Better For Labor

Recent polling LNP leads approx 55.5-44.5

Possible seat result of this 2PP LNP 56 ALP 29 Green 4 KAP 3 IND 1 

I last wrote about the Queensland polling leadup back five months ago - was it really that long? - in The Tide Is Going Out For Queensland Labor.  At that time, there had been a few polls out showing Labor trailing about 45-55 two-party preferred, which as I explained in the article is historically not surprising in the slightest.  Five months on and less than one to go til the election, they're still there.  

However it's not as if nothing at all has happened in the meantime.  Since my last article (which mentioned the 44-56 April YouGov and the 46-54 March Newspoll), things may have got worse and then got better for the Government.  There's no need for me to repeat all the details of polls that are recorded and linked to on Wikipedia but there was a string of shockers for the government through to early September.  On 2PP they had only 44.5% (est) in Resolve February to May, 43% (converted estimate) in Redbridge February+May (two waves, not a continuous sample), 43% in YouGov July 8-15, 45.5% in Redbridge May+August, 43% in Wolf + Smith 6-29 Aug (Wolf + Smith is a sort of Resolve spinoff), and 42% (est and possibly generous) in Resolve July through September.  

While the Resolve type polls in this mix have the Labor primary lower than others because of their handling of the independent vote, none of these six polls had the Labor primary with a 3 in front of it, and Redbridge's first sample had the LNP as high as 47.  The average major party primary gap across these polls was 17.5 points.

ACT Election 2024 Preview

2020 BASELINE: ALP 10 Lib 9 Green 6 (ALP-Green coalition government)

At election ALP 10 Lib 8 Green 6 FF1 (1 Liberal incumbent disendorsed and joined FF)

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This is my preview page for the 2024 ACT election.  In the absence of any reputable polling whatsoever for the entire term (seriously!) there is not too much of use I can say about outcomes, beyond pointing to some possibilities.  What I can do is look at the nature of the contests based on the 2020 result and the history of ACT elections.  The ACT is of special interest to me because it uses a variant of Hare-Clark, the system also used in Tasmania.  I may get around to writing a special effective voting article but in case I don't here's one I prepared earlier.  Firstly, I've revised my view on something about the theory of ACT elections.

Well Yes There May Be A Bit Of Federal Drag In The ACT

Federal drag is the theory and fact that it is harder for state and territory governments to do well at elections when the same party is also in power federally, especially if the federal government is not that popular.  We saw this effect in spades in the recent NT election when the first of Labor's mainland dominos fell back with a drubbing that reduced Labor to 4 seats out of 25.  One could hardly blame the feds for all of that - though one could also blame them for more than some might like to.  (There was a lot of talk about how the Voice helped Labor hold up in the majority First Nations seat, the corollary of that is that it helped them get smashed everywhere else).  

Previously when I have looked at the federal drag effect in the very left-wing ACT I have not found anything to see - there just isn't a corellation between federal drag and government seat share change.  However, on a careful look at the history of ACT elections there seems to be something - you just need to ignore the swing from 1989 and 1992, and also looking at the balance of seats between the majors shows the effect up more strongly than whether a government gains or loses seat share, because the proportional size of the crossbench fluctuates a lot more than elsewhere.  The reason for ignoring 1989-1992 is that the 1989 ACT election saw a massive and largely once-off protest vote against self-government with the major parties managing only 37.7% of the vote between them.  Labor increased from 5 of 17 seats to 8 of 17 in 1992 in the face of federal drag, but this was mostly really about a protest vote in the 1989 election disappearing.  

Why I've Quit Doing Paid Election Coverage For The Mercury

Between 2013 and 2024 I covered four state and four federal elections via live blogging for The Mercury on contract on election night, as well as writing several commissioned articles in the leadup to various elections.  I enjoyed providing this coverage and working with The Mercury's reporters and staff on election nights tremendously.  I think The Mercury in general serves the population of Hobart well, as a rare example of a Murdoch tabloid that is not particularly slanted, and that the paper provides a lot of good coverage of local political matters.  I have high regard for several journalists who work there.  In general my relationship with The Mercury in this time has been excellent, albeit slightly strained at some state election times by some polling coverage issues (lack of transparency and detail around secretive local industry polls and passing off reader surveys as polls, for example).  One doesn't expect to have everything.  

However I have decided to end this association because the Mercury's online subscription system, and customer relations in the event of failure of that system, are so dreadful that I will not work for a company that continues to rip off its customers in this way.   I will think about options for future Tasmanian state and federal election night coverage, but probably not now, as I am very busy for the next few weeks.  It's sad to have had to move on from work I and many readers enjoyed in such disappointing circumstances, but it's time to do something else with my Tasmanian and federal election nights, whatever that may be.  

Crying Wolf: More Embarrassingly Bad Tabloid Poll Reporting

 "Anthony Albanese could be on track to being a one-term Prime Minister, with a new poll showing Labor's primary vote crashing in three major states.  The federal government is in serious trouble in the eastern states - where most of the seats are - with Labor down to 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 in Victoria and 32 in NSW."

"Labor’s primary vote has crashed to just 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 per cent in Victoria and 32 per cent in New South Wales, the wolf + smith shows.  But Labor is dominant in South Australia, where its primary vote is 41 per cent, and 60 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.  The poll – which measured both state and federal voting intention – suggests the government is in dire trouble in the eastern states, with just 43 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in Queensland and 48 per cent in Victoria."

This is how the Daily Mail and the Murdoch tabloids (Courier Mail/Daily Telegraph etc) respectively wrote up a massive new poll by an initially mysterious outlet wolf + smith.  But this was in fact another example of laughably incompetent poll reporting from these outlets, one that again happened to be in service of the narrative their right-wing readers would want to see.  What the poll in fact found is very different.  The state-level figures these outlets were commenting were state voting intention not federal.  This was made so abundantly clear in the poll report that, among other subtle hints, the whole of page 10 of the poll report is devoted to making it clear that the rest of the report is state not federal.